After dealing with those errors, the county should move to convince state officials to accept future county employees into the Wisconsin Retirement System, said Schmitt, chairman of the board’s Personnel Committee.

“We’ve proven we can’t manage our pension system,” he said. “It goes back to all of the last three county executives.”

Schmitt of Wauwatosa is approaching 20 years on the County Board. He survived the recall fever that unseated seven County Board supervisors and forced County Executive F. Thomas Ament into early retirement in 2002.

Ament’s administration in 2001 engineered a series of ultra-lucrative pension changes — approved by the County Board — that nearly brought county government to its knees financially.

Schmitt said that it's amazing and frustrating that serious and expensive errors in paying out those benefits — in the form of underpayments and overpayments — have become so commonplace in the past decade and a half.

It’s not just nerve-wracking for taxpayers.

Pensioners aren’t thrilled to get letters asking them to repay thousands of dollars because of glitch by the county.

George Banda, a 68-year-old retired county firefighter at Mitchell International Airport, got one such letter in late December. The county was overpaying part of his pension and underpaying another. Bottom line: he owed $2,432, the county claimed.

He quickly paid up, and now is surprised to hear talk of the county forgiving such obligations, said Lorraine O’Malley, Banda's wife.

Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele on Wednesday call for comprehensive reforms for the county's troubled pension system and that officials should consider whether the best route is to join the state's pension system.(Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

In coming months, the County Board and County Executive Chris Abele may consider changing the long-standing policy of trying to collect overpayments. The dollars at stake can add up in a hurry: the cost of correcting hundreds of pension errors included in a long-hidden 2014 report to the IRS, and other mistakes, was estimated at nearly $2.2 million. That report didn’t become public until February.

Finding a fix

As county officials try to sort out the latest batch of blunders, talk has turned to finding permanent fixes to the chronic errors.

But what exactly is behind the problem?

And how could these mistakes persist, when the county’s elected leaders know full well the political risks of failure on pension matters?

The 2001 Ament deal and numerous subsequent changes have made calculating many individual pensions an almost unbelievably complex undertaking.

There are 180 different pension benefit plan variations based on date of hire, length of service and (labor union) bargaining unit, many of which still require hand calculation, said Abele.

By comparison, Abele noted, the state pension system, that every other county uses, has just four variations.

In 2012, county auditors reported “heavy ongoing reliance on outside contractors” to help sort out problems in the county system.

Some of the errors involve seemingly straightforward concepts like annual cost-of-living adjustments, suggesting a lack of training, oversight or hiring deficiencies.

Another factor: rogue payouts with little or no basis in ordinances or rules, such as the massive payouts to former seasonal county workers exposed in 2007 by the Journal Sentinel.

A host of reasons

In the Ament scandal, a key aide to the county executive was sentenced to jail after he was charged with misleading county officials about the potential costs of a key aspect of the pension deal.

Mismanagement and micromanagement have played roles.

A document purge of paper files led to destruction of key pension documents when a well-meaning manager didn’t keep an eye on temporary employees hired for the task.

That made it hard to test the accuracy of pension calculations, the county auditors found.

Elected officials, sometimes looking out for themselves, repeatedly have meddled in pension matters instead of leaving matters to professionals. The retirement office is buried on the county management chart. Until recently, turnover had plagued the office.

So, pick your poison.

Progress has been made. The office no longer reflexively sides with employees in disputes over benefits, as it did in Ament’s era, observers said.

The most recent director of the retirement office, Marian Ninneman, recently fired for not fixing a big mistake, reportedly made headway in assembling a talented team and cleaning up mistakes by her predecessors or others.

One key question is how much Abele and pension officials will reveal about the errors.

Will the public learn which pensioners benefited and which were underpaid due to the errors in the 2014 report? The names were made public in earlier such instances under Abele and former County Executive Scott Walker.

Last week, Abele assured county employees that he was researching reforms to protect their hard-earned benefits.

But he injected a reality check into his email.

“We also must balance these decisions with the county’s ability to provide essential services that people rely on and make investments in transit, parks, and workforce development,” Abele's email said.